Josh Babarinde makes progress with his campaign for a separate domestic abuse offence

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The Guardian has slapped an "Exclusive" label on its report that Josh Babarinde has called for a specific defence of domestic violence to be introduced.

This is a bad case of overselling, given that he appeared on Good Morning on 10 December to talk about the idea.

But there are encouraging developments in the report. Josh says he has received support from both Labour and Conservative MPs, and its claims that:

Officials are examining whether to change the way domestic violence crimes are recorded after a campaign by an MP who says the lack of a specific offence allows abusers to be freed early from jail.

The quote from a Ministry of Justice spokesperson at the end is less definite than this:

"Domestic abuse comes in many forms, not just physical. Under the current system, domestic abusers already face longer sentences as it is considered an aggravating factor in sentencing for a wide range of offences. However, the independent review of sentencing, led by David Gauke, has been tasked with looking at how best to address crimes of violence against women and girls in future."

The other day I heard David Blunkett quoted as saying this government has "hit the ground reviewing," but let's hope something good comes of this one.

Josh spoked movingly to the Guardian about his own childhood, saying he recalls violence as creating a "really lonely" home life: 

"I would be upstairs in my room hearing an argument unfold, voices raised, shouts, screams, things smashed, and I would pull my covers over me and just sit crying. I didn’t know if my mum was OK."

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Clare Coffey watches It's a Wonderful Life: "It is seeing Mary without him that breaks George enough to make him ask for life, as it is her just anger at him that sends him into the most desperate phase of his downward spiral."

"A target will probably be someone who has particular weaknesses that can be exploited, often revolving around money or sex. They are seldom at the very pinnacle of power. But that, in itself, can leave them resentful and hungry for affirmation." Philip Murphy believes the British establishment offers a "target-rich environment" to spies.

Timothy Garton Ash asks what will happen if Russia wins in Ukraine: "Ukraine would be defeated, divided, demoralised and depopulated. The money would not come in to reconstruct the country; instead, another wave of people would leave it ... Europe as a whole would see an escalation of the hybrid war that Russia is already waging against it, still largely unnoticed by most blithely Christmas-shopping west Europeans."

Chris Dillow on the rise of managerialism and fall of British business management: "Managerialism has a messiah complex and belief in great leaders, whereas management looks for good fits between bosses and roles. Managerialism tries to apply the same methods everywhere, whereas management knows it is domain-specific; what works in (say) supermarkets might not work in universities."

The inter-war council estates that George Orwell wrote about in The Road to Wigan Pier are visited by Municipal Dreams.

"Thirkell makes quite a few stealth jokes about sexuality that have a camp insouciance, in strong contrast to her otherwise default tone of extreme social conservatism." Kate Macdonald considers the contrasting treatment of male homosexuality and lesbianism in the novels of Angela Thirkell.

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Arthur Snell explains why Assad was so violent: "The implications of a small, historically marginal and theologically unorthodox group holding the reins of power are clear: from the start they have had a strong incentive to shore up their power-base through inter-marriage, self-enrichment and repression of the majority."

"A decade ago, liberals, liberaltarians and straight libertarians could readily enthuse about “liberation technologies” and Twitter revolutions in which nimble pro-democracy dissidents would use the Internet to out-maneuver sluggish governments. Technological innovation and liberal freedoms seemed to go hand in hand. Now they don’t. Authoritarian governments have turned out to be quite adept for the time being, not just at suppressing dissidence but at using these technologies for their own purposes." Henry Farrell analyses the changing politics of Silicon Valley.

Isabelle Roughol and John Elledge take us on a women's history tour along London’s Suffragette line: "In a tale as old as social progress itself, suffragists and suffragettes clashed with one another over issues of ideological purity and how to win over public opinion. As the suffragettes’ tactics got increasingly radical, 50,000 women marched on London’s streets in 1913 to say 'Not in our name!'"

"The sea has been pressing back into the boulder clay here for centuries, claiming churches, homes, villages and lives. Ten miles north of Withernsea, at Aldbrough, I saw a recently tarmacked road charging confidently out into thin air like something from a Road Runner cartoon." David Hancox writes about living on the fastest-eroding coastline in Europe.

"Her new home in Rotherfield, East Sussex had fifty acres and included a lake, topiary and an orangery. Lisa Marie cooked, gardened, created her own pub at the house where local friends such as Jeff Beck would pop by for a pint and a singalong." Jessica Olin reviews Lisa Marie Presley's posthumous memoir.

Charles Bramesco argues that David Lynch's Dune (1984) is due a re-evaluation.

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"Starmer was attempting a card trick that mainstream political parties across the West have tried to play in recent years - defeat the hard-right by borrowing their talking points and framing, and then somehow prove that you are better able to deal with this problem than they are." Matt Carr has no confidence in Keir Starmer's attempt to meet the Reform challenge to Labour.

"Syrians are under no illusion that the future will be hard, complicated and may end up being disappointing and even dangerous. Please can we all do them the courtesy of wishing them well, and offering support if it is requested, rather than writing them off now before they’ve even finished freeing and identifying the prisoners from Assad’s concentration camps?" Jonathan Brown calls for optimism about Syria.

Christine Jardine argues that hate crime legislation is not the right way to tackle sexism: "Having once felt the hate crime route was best, I now find the counter argument compelling. It is not just the worst cases – physical and verbal attacks or domestic abuse – that are the end result of misogynistic behaviour. It is everywhere, every day in so many ways."

"Conspiracy theories are not the reason Trump was elected. They are more like the oil that makes the process smoother or faster. What is really being described in the election result is not an electorate declaring it believes every line about theories of secret power structures running the world, but it is an expression of deep disillusionment: how it is to feel disenfranchised, to be poor, that the future is bleaker than the past." Gabriel Gatehouse and Matthew Sweet discuss what America’s rampant conspiracy culture means for truth and democracy now that some of its leading proponents may soon be in office.

Henrietta Billings, director of SAVE Britain’s Heritage, on why the Oxford Street M&S demolition decision exposes a broken planning system and how we need urgent reform to safeguard heritage assets and reduce embodied carbon emissions.

Judit Polgar, the strongest ever woman chess player, calls for the abolition of separate titles (such as woman grandmaster), with lower qualifying standards, for women players. Though they were introduced to encourage women players, she believes they tend to limit their ambition.

Victorian women in crinolines were the ultimate fashion victims

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Content warning: This is a horrible passage of 19th-century history.

A number of factors combined in crinolines to make them a ridiculously dangerous death trap for anyone wearing them. During the peak of their popularity they killed at least 3000 people in the UK alone according to an 1860 article in the Lancet, and in 1864 a Bulgarian doctor reported that over the previous 14 years he believed that at least 39,927 women had died in crinoline fires.

This is from a horrifying article in the Christmas Fortean Times. Crinolines - stiff petticoats worn to hold out a skirt - were the height of fashion for women from the 1840s to the 1860s, and enjoyed intermittent revivals later in the century. Latterly, a metal frame replaced most of the petticoats.

They were such a fire hazard for two reasons. First, the skirt above became huge and unwieldy, so it was easy for a woman to brush against a fire or lighted candle. Second, the crinolines themselves were made of swathes of light, gauzy material, none of it treated to make it fire resistant.

The result is that the article, The Crinoline Inferno by Ian Simmons, is stuffed with barely credible horrors. One such runs:

In another incident in 1861 an entire corps de ballet - seven dancers in total, including the four English Gale sisters - died together when they tried to help each other after one dancer's costume ignited at the Continental Theatre in Philadelphia.

And that was nothing to the 126 people, mainly aristocratic ladies wearing highly flammable crinolines and corset, who died in a fire at the 1897 Bazaar de la Charité. Still less to the two or three thousand who died in the 1863 Church of the Company fire in Santiago.

Fashionable victims included:

the teenage Archduchess Mathilde of Austria, who died when she was surprised smoking by her father and hid the cigarette behind her back touching her dress as she did so and going up in flames instantly. 

Two illegitimate half-sisters of Oscar Wilde also died after crinoline fires - "both died a lingering death several days later". Little was said about their deaths as their father, a prominent Dublin doctor, did not want to draw attention to the family and its scandals.

As a result, the tale remained part of the secret folklore of Dublin for many years, growing in the telling to include a mysterious black-draped woman who regularly visited the girls' grave and. later. their father on his deathbed. It is not clear whether Oscar knew of his sisters' fate. or indeed their existence.

A further hazard was added when the colour Paris Green became fashionable in women's fashion. The die that produced it included arsenic, and women became ill through poisoning just from wearing this shade as a result.

Finally, the crinoline remained lethal even in the 20th century. In 1930 Nita Foy, a dancer appearing in a period film at Twickenham Studios, died in crinoline fire after her costume brushed against an electric fire in the dressing room of one of the actors. The room, says Matthew Sweet in his Shepperton Babylon, became a site of ghoulish pilgrimage.

Josh Babarinde makes the case for his Domestic Abuse Bill

The Liberal Democrat MP for Eastbourne, Josh Babarinde was on Good Morning earlier today to talk about the Domestic Abuse Bill he is looking to pilot through the Commons.

As he explains in the video, there is currently no separate offence of domestic abuse. This means that abusers are convicted of something like actual bodily harm, with the result that they cannot be excluded from early-release schemes and the like.

With the new clarity a separate offence would bring, survivors of domestic abuse could be better protected.

A website has been set up to support the campaign for an offence of domestic abuse. It includes a petition you can sign.

Andrew George reflects on 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence

In his column for The Voice, Andrew George (Liberal Democrat MP for St Ives) writes:

The annual international campaign to end violence against women and girls kicks off on November 25 - “16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence” - running till December 10, Human Rights Day.

I’ve reflected on my (small) role supporting the early days of Penzance Women's Aid, and creation of first refuge, 33 years ago! It’s provided essential, lifesaving and enhancing protection for women and their families fleeing domestic violence ever since. 

What caused me to reflect was the realisation that I had been wrong. Wrong, in that I had then naively believed we were on a progressive path where, in time, there’d be no need for such organisations. If anything, the problem is worse.

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"The adversarial trial system has been shown inadequate to deal with complex, and indeed developing, scientific data in Lucy Letby's trials. Procedure has triumphed over the serious search for the truth. Yet there is also the question as to whether existing legal procedures were followed over testing expert witnesses." Timothy Bradshaw claims that Lucy Letby has been betrayed by a legal system that can’t handle scientific evidence.

Ian Martin is not impressed by Boris Johnson's Unleashed: "On the basis of this magnum opus, satirists who’d pointed their lances at some imaginary political giant were in fact tilting at a windbag."

Jamie Stone, who has served at both Holyrood and Westminster, compares the two parliaments: "Having been a Member since its inception in 1999, I happen to know that when they were being trained, the staff were instructed to address the newly elected MSP’s as Mr, Mrs, Ms and so forth… but never by their first name. I also happen to know that this training fell on deaf ears from the very start. I was Jamie on day one, and still am today. I must admit that’s how I’ve always preferred it."

The organisation that became the RSPB was started by Victorian women protesting against the use of feather in millinery, shows Tessa Boase.

"The Lansbury Exhibition of Architecture would show how town planning and scientific building principles would provide a better environment in which to live and work, and how this would be applied to the redevelopment of London and the new towns planned across the country." A London Inheritance finds much of this 1951 event still standing in the East End.

Xan Brooks gives his choice of the best fiction set in the American South.

Margaret Wintringham: The first woman Liberal MP

The first woman Liberal MP was Margaret Wintringham, who held Louth in a by-election in September 1921. She won despite being in mourning for her husband Tom, whose death caused the election.

This video explores her political career and achievements during her short time in the Commons (1921-4), including her work on the Widow's Orphans' and Old Age Contributory Pensions Act and the Guardianship of Infants Act.

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"The Houses of Parliament are sinking into the Thames. Many dozens of offices were condemned upon their vacation by outgoing MPs. There are electrical and water hazards only a few metres underfoot, and the whole thing will cost billions to fix – not least because MPs are insistent they stay in the building while it happens." Steffan Aquarone says the physical state of the Palace of Westminster is a metaphor for the organisational changes that are needed there.

Richard Kemp promised to put the cause of carer leavers at the heart of his work as Lord Mayor of Liverpool. He writes about an event held yesterday that will help him honour this pledge.

"Dr Newman debunked the popular idea of 'Blue Zones' as regions of exceptional longevity and healthy lifestyles. Many, if not most of the centenarians in the ‘Blue Zone’ have turned out to be alive in the government records but deceased in reality." The press people at University College London on work by Saul Justin Newman that revealed fundamental flaws in research on extreme old age.

Pam Fisher has researched Loughborough's first workhouse.

Amy Boucher is intrigued by Shropshire's female ghosts: "Some of our female spirits have strong historical basis, one only has to peel back the layers to uncover a real woman. Other tales are harder to track down historically, but instead can come to symbolise the suffering and experiences of a collective womanhood. Some of their experiences may even be familiar to you, though your stories are separated by the centuries."

"Perhaps 'cooked' is too euphemistic a term. To be quite accurate, they had held the sausages over a smoking fire till completely blackened, and then consumed the charred remains with the utmost relish." Alwyn Turner offers an anthology of sausages in literature." 

Lib Dems lose control of Dacorum after eight female councillors resign from group

From Hemel Today:

Eight female councillors in Dacorum have left the Liberal Democrat group after accusing the council leader of “failing to deal with allegations of bullying and harassment, including sexual harassment”.

It means the Liberal Democrats have lost their majority on the borough council, which has now moved into no overall control.

The councillors, who included two cabinet members and will now sit as independents, announced they were leaving the group during a full council meeting yesterday (Wednesday, 25 September). They remain members of the Liberal Democrat party.

The report goes on to quote a statement from the eight women and give some of the background to the affair.

Dacorum Council is based in Hemel Hempstead. The borough also includes the towns of Berkhamsted and Tring and surrounding villages. 

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"The Labour government appears to think that improving the delivery of public services will be sufficient to resolve the embittered alienation of so many voters from British politics. Do we dare as liberals to argue that democracy requires a much more active engagement with our citizens, at national and at local levels?" William Wallace says the Liberal Democrats should be setting the agenda, not following it.

Christian Wolmar claims he has the ideal road plan for Britain: take the 16 major highway schemes worth £15bn and bin them.

"White privately-educated British male cricketers were 34 times more likely to play professionally than state-educated British South Asians." Taha Hashim on the work of the South Asian Cricket Academy.

Red Flag Walks looks back to the feminist protest against the 1970 Miss World contest: "Sarah Wilson was chosen to start the protest. 'When Bob Hope was going on and on with terrible, grotesque stuff, I got up and swung my football rattle. It seemed ages before anybody responded – people were lighting their cigarettes to ignite the smoke bombs – but then I saw stuff beginning to cascade down.'"

"He was fiercely loyal to the series. Although he consumed my words at an alarming rate, he had an armoury of looks, leers, shrugs and incredulous expressions that earned me laughs I never had to write. Len was the driving force behind Rising Damp." The late Eric Chappell, creator of the series, tells the story of Leonard Rossiter and Rising Damp, the show he created and wrote 50 years ago.

A London Inheritance goes in search of the power station on what is now St Pancras Way: "The first phase of the power station faced the Regents Canal and the large area of railway coal depots, and this was one of the reasons why the power station was located here – the easy access to supplies of coal, whether delivered to the power station via train to the depot opposite, or along the canal from Regents Canal Dock (now Limehouse Dock), brought in from the north east of the country using colliers."

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"Psychologists, however, are all too aware that people are reluctant to change their minds and that, when it happens at all, it occurs gradually. Famously, those who invest heavily in ideological projects such as end-of-the-world cults (or Prohibition, or Brexit) are likely to double down when their prophecies fail (numerous cults have seen the hour of the apocalypse arrive and pass without incident, and then simply recalibrated their calendars)." Richard Bentall asks when Britain will change its mind on Brexit.

Gemma Gould sets out what happens to women who speak out on social media: "For women who take a stand on social issues, the backlash can be swift and severe. In the UK, women in politics, journalism, activism and other public spheres who speak out against injustice are often met with hostility. This hostility is not limited to public debate; it extends into their personal lives, affecting their mental health, well-being and sometimes even their safety."

Phil O'Brien celebrates the Welsh socialist writer Raymond Williams on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

"As I learnt more about the history of these stones, I became more interested in them. The myths attached to them are Christian – the church was assigning meaning to all this ancient stuff to scare people into conformity. And that’s really intriguing. Why were the Methodists so keen to come into Cornwall to control the working classes? What the hell were we up to?" Mark Jenkin talks to Bob Fisher about his film Enys Men.

"Towards the bottom right-hand corner is St Georges Recreation Ground. The former cinder running track with a spectator pavilion is highlighted by the green surround. The 100-yard sprint section on which Harold Abrahams qualified for the 1924 Olympics in Paris (where he won the 100-metres Gold medal) can just be seen." Anthony Rowley on the volumes of history to be found in one aerial photograph of a Shropshire village.

Jonathan Pomeroy watches this year's swift season end.

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"Easy though it is to mock the quality of the Tory leadership hopefuls, enabling and encouraging the worst impulses of the far-right carries dangers for our country and our democracy, as we have seen just this week. We need a serious government, but we also need a serious opposition. Right now the Tories cannot and will not fulfil the latter role." Alistair Carmichael says the Tory leadership contest is revealing that the party’s lurch to far-right is terrifyingly real.

Lauren Crosby Medlicott on what life's like inside a UK women's prison and the need to find other ways of dealing with female offenders.

"To be happy and healthy, children need a decent amount of everyday, sociable play and physical activity. To grow into independent, capable, resilient young adults, they need a chance to experience real life, explore and take risks. To develop a sense of belonging and responsibility for others, they need to be seen and heard in their communities." Alice Ferguson presents a manifesto for restoring children’s freedom and outdoor play.

Corinne Segal takes us to four cities - New York, Baltimore, Auckland, Istanbul - that are bringing buried rivers back into the light of day.

"Detoxification" is a popular concept in wellness but, says Adrienne Matei, it's just another lie.

Rohan Amanda Maitzen understands what it is that makes T.H. White's The Once and Future King great: "The novel’s most ridiculous, delicious flights of fancy (the thwarted romance of the Questing Beast, for instance) are narrated in the same down-to-earth way as the most extreme moments of betrayal or grief or psychic torment ... and so we experience them both as part of the same world of people who may transform into animals, trap unicorns, and perform miracles, but are somehow, bizarrely, wonderfully, just like us."

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The new voter ID rules rolled out in this month’s General Election may have prevented 370,000 people from casting their ballots, disproportionately affecting women and people of colour, reports Josiah Mortimer.

Huw Lewis examines how Vaughan Gething's short period as first minister fell apart and what it means for Welsh Labour: "As we look ahead to the next Senedd election in 2026 (which will be fought using a fully proportional electoral system), the multiparty nature of Welsh devolved politics is only likely to increase. How Labour responds to that challenge is a question that the party should consider carefully as it moves to elect its third Welsh leader within a year."

"The constant blaming of [Andrew] Tate for the rise of misogyny is making me increasingly uneasy. Not because I want to diminish his role or responsibility. But because if all this *waves hands manically at young men increasingly hating women* is Tate’s fault, it lets everyone else off the hook." Sian Norris on men and misogyny. 

"Boundaries have always been fuzzy, and the further a concept moves away from the diagnostic criteria, the fuzzier they become. Once a diagnosis is 'liberated from conventional psychiatric nosology', then it will mean very different things to different people." Naomi Fisher discusses the societal effect of the rise of psychiatric self-diagnosis.

Adam Wren looks at how The Lord of the Rings has influenced the politics of Donald Trump's vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance.

Stephanie Gaunt takes us to the Crossness Pumping Station at Abbey Wood on the lower Thames: "It is very much a work in progress. Only one of the four massive engines, the Prince Consort, is in working order, and another, Victoria, is in the process of restoration. The other two are huge inert masses of rusty iron."

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Graeme Hayes and Steven Cammiss argue that the harsh sentences imposed on Just Stop Oil protestors are the logical outcome of Britain’s authoritarian turn against protest.

"In the rush to recognise Trump’s new victim status, nobody seemed to be thinking about his own invocations of brutality. Before he was banned from Twitter, he had been warned for 'glorifying violence'. He said Mexicans trying to cross the border illegally should be shot in the leg. At the time of the Black Lives Matter protests relating to the murder of George Floyd, he tweeted: 'when the looting starts, the shooting starts'." Andrew O'Hagan went to the Republican National Convention.

"It isn’t that all feminism’s forebears have been forgotten. But those who are remembered tend to be celebrated for their most singular and charismatic deeds. Suffragettes pouring acid on golf courses and women’s libbers flour-bombing the 1970 Miss World contest have both recently featured in films. I love these stories. But they are not instruction manuals." Susanna Rustin searches London for memorials to early feminists.

Ray Casey dreams of reopening the coastal railway line from Middlesbrough to Scarborough.

"A former miner, he recounted being trapped by a rockfall and waiting for hours to be rescued without being able to move a millimetre. There must be mental powers of concentration and stamina bound up with this experience which were probably transferable to the experience of playing endless frames of snooker." Conrad Brunstrom pays tribute to Ray Reardon.

Patricia Herlihy on the flowers to be found in her garden in July: "A few might seem to be weeds to some, but I find them to be useful as pollinator foods and very pretty as well."

Nine-year-old selected to play for England women's chess team

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From the Guardian:

She is a nine-year-old British prodigy, who has already caused a commotion in the chess world with her fearless play and string of spectacular victories. Now Bodhana Sivanandan, a nine-year-old from Harrow, is set to make history as the youngest person to represent England in international sporting competition.

Sivanandan, who only took up chess in lockdown, is one of five players chosen for England’s women’s team to play in the Chess Olympiad in Budapest in September. The next youngest player, Lan Yao, is 23, while the other members of the team, Jovanka Houska, Harriet Hunt and Kata Toma, are all in their 30s and 40s.

“I’m so pleased to be picked for England,” said Sivanandan, who has set her sights on becoming a grandmaster and winning the women’s world title. “It’s a great honour and I’m looking forward to being part of a team.”

Malcolm Pein, one of the selectors, suggests that Bodhana "must surely be the youngest to be selected to represent England in any international sporting competition," and the Guardian's researches suggest he is right.

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"The ABC shared its findings with disinformation experts, who said the network's activity had the hallmarks of a Russian influence operation." Michael Workman and Kevin Nguyen reveal the Australian broadcaster's research into Russian interference in the general election and how - suddenly - the Tories are concerned about it.

"Starmer has picked his battles well and, for the most part, won them. For instance, the Labour leader has pledged to restore the UK’s net zero targets to their more ambitious former selves - prior to Sunak’s tinkering. Meanwhile, he continues to rubbish the government’s Rwanda deportation plan as an expensive, overly elaborate gimmick." Josh Self argues that Keir Starmer's part in the collapse of the Conservative Party should be not be overlooked.

Gary Hutchison discusses his research into violence in Victorian elections.

Hazel Marsh, Esbjörn Wettermark and Tiffany Hore on the way Romani Gypsy and Traveller people have shaped Britain’s musical heritage: "In 1907, after hearing Romani Gypsy Betsy Holland sing in Devon, Cecil Sharp (a key figure in the first English folk revival) wrote: 'Talk of folk-singing! It was the finest and most characteristic bit of singing I had ever heard.'"

"Knife is a clear and unsurprising departure. We have a defiant Rushdie, still, but also a vulnerable one. It’s a vulnerability he didn’t allow in his 2012 autobiography Joseph Anton, a highly readable book but whose third-person narration sounds as affected on the page as he would in person." Shehryar Fazli reviews Salman Rushdie new memoir.

Amy Lim says that, for all the nostalgic prettiness of her watercolors, Helen Allingham was a highly professional, pioneering woman artist: "In her lifetime, through a combination of talent, hard work and shrewd marketing, Allingham enjoyed immense critical and commercial success. She was also, for many years, a single mother, supporting her children through her art."

Glenda Jackson interviewed by Mavis Nicholson in 1973

Here's another treat from the archive of Mavis Nicholson interviews on YouTube: Glenda Jackson in her prime.

Green Party deputy is former hypnotherapist who said he could help women increase their breast size

The Telegraph wins our Headline of the Day Award, though the judges did feel the paper should have made it clear that it was the Green Party's deputy leader who once made the claim.

You can see the story that follows it elsewhere online.